davidn

There's an American book series called the Bathroom Readers, which are yearly sort of Reader's Digest-style collections of articles on random subjects, and are traditionally bought by Whitney's family because one of their family friends is the model for a stock image of a scientist that they always use on the back cover. This morning, in one of the little facts that run along the bottom of each page, I read that "There's a British TV show called Watching Paint Dry. It shows paint drying."

Allow me to be the spokesperson here and say: no there bloody isn't! There was a webcast by that name on a UK satellite channel's site, set up as a short-running joke in order to highlight how vacuous reality TV had become and speed up its demise. Unfortunately for all of us, it failed to have any effect.

Just because our television isn't as supremely seizure-inducing as the American variety (even the local news here has more flash-grenade-like explosions than an Iron Savior video) doesn't mean we all look forward to sitting around watching programmes on the history of wood or the future of wallpaper. Or that we have TV about the national hair-cutting championships, for that matter.

I suppose we did give the world Last of the Summer Wine, which when compared to Watching Paint Dry, has just about the same effect.